GRP-057 Errors in Medicines Preparation and Administration in Vietnamese Hospitals

Abstract

Background and objectives: Medication errors can occur at any stage of the drug use process, prescribing, transcribing, dispensing, preparation, or administration. Little is known about preparation and administration errors in hospitals, especially in Asia, including Vietnam. In this study, we determined the prevalence, type and severity of medication preparation and administration errors. Design: This is a prospective study using an observation-based approach. Four trained pharmacy students observed all drug preparations and administrations on six wards, 12 h per day on 7 consecutive days. Potential clinical relevance of errors was judged by experts using a validated method. Setting: Six different wards of two public hospitals in a large city in Vietnam. Main outcome measures: Prevalence, type and potential clinical relevance of medication errors. Results: In total, 2122 (37.7 %, 95 % confidence interval (CI) 36.4-38.9 %) out of 5635 observations had at least one error. Overall, 2552 errors were identified. Most frequent errors were wrong administration technique, wrong preparation technique, omission, wrong dose and wrong drug, (53.1, 32.6, 5.0, 4.1, and 2.6 %, respectively). Potential clinical relevance was judged to be moderate in the majority of the cases (87.8 %), followed by severe (8.8 %), and minor errors (3.4 %). Medications with complex preparation procedures more likely involved errors than simple ones (58.1 vs. 24.7 %, P = 0.00), and error rate of intravenous medications was much higher than that of other medications (73.2 vs. 12.4 %, P = 0.00). Conclusions: Around a third of all observations involved at least one preparation or administration errors. Our results showed a relatively high error rate in comparison to other studies. This suggests the need of active interventions to improve the situation.